WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE
ONE ANOTHER
Writers striving so hard to be unlike
one another
as they’re looking for new
similitudes between themselves
and the many in the one, the one in the
many,
everyman writing the autobiography of
his loss of identity.
Everywoman etching hers with her
fingernails
like grafitti on a glass ceiling
breaking
like chandeliers of rain along the
fault lines
of a shift in continental plates.
Captain of a dreamliner
I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a
long time ago.
I sing to my own silence whenever I
want to be heard.
Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with
mystic outcomes
I rely on too much, I can see the
horror and the humour
in the sublimity of the black, morality
farce
that gets laid over your face like a
death mask
people can recognize you by like a
patina of soot
on the thin chapbooks of the
butterflies sipping
from a Venus fly trap like the
wellspring of the muse.
Young, in a room that doubled for a
shrine,
I had a dark genius for making people
mad.
Later, as islands emerged out of my
magmatic rage,
my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace
for making them cry
but that was still the lunar
achievement of a journeyman
watergilding children walking skinless
through the world,
wrapping their tears in the iridescent
sheen of the nightsky
like a lullaby that had compassion for
their dreams.
Master of nothing now, working in the
creative freedom
of an abyss that entices me out of
myself
like nature into the vacuum of an
unknown medium
when I’m not a genie on call, I can
hear the laughter
of the sacred clowns in the iconic
guildhalls
of a little skill, more yielding than a
thousand acres,
you can carry around with you for life
like the voice
of a nightbird that knows how to
penetrate the dark
like the embodiment of a longing that
asks for nothing back.
Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes
in solitude.
If I shine, I shine without
deliberation. If I love
I rise like foxfire from the ashes of
the inspiration.
Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling,
sometimes
I’m wrapped in darkness like the
skeletal kite
of a troubled bat that can hear more
than it can say.
The night is not a reward, but there’s
never
a credible alibi for not laughing at
yourself
for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical
starmap
trying to get you to sit still like a
fixed star
for your astral portrait in eighteenth
dynasty starmud
glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and
copper from the moon.
The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the
pharoah’s magicians,
I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily
when the stars
look into my eyes too seriously to see
what keeps me burning
after so many light years away from the
island universe
on which I was born. Life, the mystery
of perishing perennially,
there’s a hidden secret to being
clear that supersedes the obvious.
And when death calls for it, I gouge my
eyes out
like symbolic jewels embedded in the
underworld
so I can envision the eschatology of
meanings
trying to justify their ends as if
death had embarrassed them
by not making any sense they could
cling to for solace in life.
I celebrate the absurdity of the
insight death brings forth
like a firefly with the candlepower of
billions of stars.
How the mighty must fall to appreciate
the magnificence
of their own insignificance raised up
like a grain of sand
to keep the pyramids in perspective
like studs on Orion’s belt.
I enjoy a hermetic social life among a
variety
of prophetic skulls, but even the moon
isn’t a palliative
for my solitude when I hallucinate the
fate that awaits me
like a lover at every corner of my
coffin. Pay the mourners
before the tears on their cheeks are
dry. Didn’t I write
the most amazing odes to catch their
beauty on the fly?
Didn’t I publish the names of the
flowers and the stars
that moved my spirit to give them
something
to remember me by like the lyrical
elation
of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t
I emblazon
the heraldry of new constellations with
argent starmaps
on the shield walls of exoskeletons in
the Burgess Shale?
Wasn’t my madness enough to convince
the shore-huggers
of the imminent dangers of an oceanic
awareness
beyond the eyes of their circumspect
tidal pools?
Came a time when I realized it
crucially necessary
to be given up for lost like a heretic
with nothing to confess
but forgiveness for the spiritual
search parties
in the labyrinths of everybody’s
fingertips in order
to decipher a way out of here like
Braille hieroglyphs
breaking trail like a cul de sac in a
desert of stars.
Don’t the homeless still seek shelter
within
the boundary stones of the firepits I
left in my wake
like lost and founds along the way I
had to take?
Don’t gauge the size of the city by
the measure of its gates.
Exits don’t always live up to the
expectations of the entrance.
Sometimes the sunset disappoints the
dawn.
And then here and gone all things turn
around in a heartbeat
like the wind and the sea, and the
toxicity of tomatoes,
and all those weathervanes we used to
flip through
like telephone books with tenure, set
in their ways
like wet cement, appear cumbersomely
contrived and shallow
beside the depths of the nightbirds
singing
in the shadows of the moonrise they’re
drowning
their voices in like stars in the
throats of autumn trees
with their hearts in their mouths like
the taste of wild blackberries.
PATRICK WHITE
